After working as a community organizer for almost ten years and earning a bachelors degree in sociology, it is impossible for me to look at personal experience as unique individual happenstance. I look at the very deep ways that individuals are impacted by cultural, political, and economic movements and, likewise, how the experiences of individuals add up into trends that have an impact at national and global levels. In my work I try to show a dialogue between the solitary individual experience and the corresponding societal events.
I began my exploration with a series of plates on which I drew images based on my family’s old photographs. They are of first generation Jewish Americans in immigrant neighborhoods in New York City in the 1930s. Some of the people represented I have known personally, others only through stories and photos, and others only through my imaginings. I weave text from family legends onto pieces to evoke a narrative. I chose to use plates and cups as a medium for these stories because of the importance of ritual family gatherings around food and drink. Traditions, especially those related to preparing and eating food, are passed down from generation to generation, as are the stories of our ancestors. There is an intimacy in scale and content, a familiarity in the object. I am inspired by European porcelain dinnerware and commemorative platters. Here I memorialize people and events that are only partially known to me. This work is a celebration of the search for one’s past through fragments of other people’s memories.
In my works about my family, I use representations of the individual to imply shared experiences within the larger culture. With my more recent pieces I suggest the inverse, presenting images of events that hold national importance while reminding the viewer of their impact on individuals.
In my newer body of work, the scale of the pieces is larger and represents the excesses in our culture, the endless desire for more excitement, drama, sensationalism, consumerism. In this work I am exploring the way that tragedy is exploited for commercial and political gain. I use imagery which relates to September 11, 2001 because of my intimate relationship with that particular tragedy (I was under the World Trade Center during the attack and worked doing disaster assistance in the following months). I use it as an example of other significant social events. Ideas I touch on are the sensationalism and glamorization of tragedy, voyeurism of suffering and publicity of private emotional moments, obsession with real and imagined events, and the bizarre (and offensive) way corporations make money off tragedy while trying to appear humane. I use a palate of red, white, and blue to show the way these images of people in pain have been co-opted to promote patriotism and move an agenda that is entirely unrelated to the people in the pictures being used.
In my ceramic work I depict objects and events from my personal history that also have implications for the larger society. I give the viewer enough information to pique her curiosity about the characters or the story but still leave questions unanswered.
